Earthquake Engineering :: Sharing Knowledge and Expertise

DINESH C. SHARMA

The January 26 earthquake in Kutch region of Gujarat once again brought into focus
earthquake science and our preparedness for such natural disasters. India has had three
major quakes during the past decade. This time the situation is particularly grim because of
the huge loss of life and widespread destruction in a relatively prosperous region of the
country. Not only have urban and rural buildings been razed to the ground, the quake has
caused great local and national financial loss.

As is said often – quakes don’t kill people, it is the unsafe buildings, which do. The
Bhuj quake’s aftermath is a living example of this. Earthquakes of much greater intensity
have been experienced elsewhere in the world, but the death tolls have been much lower
than in Bhuj. Buildings can be made quake-resistant, if no1 quake- proof, by following
building codes defined by the seismic history of a particular region. The Bureau of Indian
Standards (BIS) has evolved a seismic hazard map of the country, and set building codes for
each of the five regions – for both engineered and non-engineered structures. But
unfortuna1ely, these codes are not mandatory and hence not adhered to. As a result, even
engineered structures in urban areas like Ahmedabad crashed literally like a pack of cards.

On the other hand, consider the case of California, which falls in a highly seismic
region in the west coast of the U.S. In October 1989, a high magnitude quake rocked the
Santa Cruz Mountains in central California. The impact was felt in downtown San Francisco
– l00 kilometers away – where occupants of the Transamerica Pyramid were unnerved. The
49-story office building shook for more than a minute. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
instruments, installed years earlier, showed that the top floor swayed more than one foot
from side to side! However, no one was seriously injured, and the Transamerica Pyramid
was not damaged. This famous San Francisco landmark had been designed to withstand
even greater earthquake stresses, and that design worked as planned during the quake.

“No building is earthquake-proof. But a properly engineered tall building should be

able to withstand the maximum credible earthquake for its area without collapse, and lesser
seismic events without major structural damage,” says R. Shankar Nair, chairman of Council
on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Chicago. “Of course, mistakes do happen, even in the
U.S. But if American standards of design and construction had prevailed in the Bhuj area (an
economic impossibility, of course), there would have been casualties from the collapse of a
few small buildings and from falling objects, but no large, recently-built multistory building
should have collapsed.”

“California offers many good models which can be adapted to Indian conditions with
the objective of better earthquake safety. But what we need most is enforcement of Indian
standards on earthquake design. Most often theseare not being followed,” observed Sudhir
K. Jain, professor and head at the department of civil engineering, Indian Institute of
technology in Kanpur (IITK), who was a co-leader of a joint Indo-U.S. team to the Bhuj
region soon after the January 26 quake. William Lettis, a geologist, from the Lettis &
associates, Walnut Creek, California, was also a co-leader of the team. Funded by the
National Science Foundation, the team was a part of “Learning from Earthquakes” program
of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), Oakland, California.
 Though the top floor of the 49-story
Transamreica Pyramid swayed more than one
foot from side to side in the 1989 San
Francisco earthquake, no one was injured nor
the building damaged. Casualties were
comparatively few in that quake. Most houses
that collapsed were built on unstable ground.

The nine U.S. team members spent ten days in the field with their Indian counterparts
in an investigation of the impact of the earthquake on the built environment, lifelines, port
facilities, emergency response, shelter and interim housing. The team began its
reconnaissance investigation in the city of Ahmedabad, and then moved to the more severely
damaged epicentral areas.

Members of the team included several Indian-American engineers. The U.S. experts
included Donald Ballantyne (EQE International, Inc., Seattle), Rakesh Goel (Cal Poly State
University, San Luis Obispo Civil and Environmental Engineering), James Hengesh (URS
Corporation, San Francisco), Praveen Malhotra (Factory Mutual Research Corp, Boston),
Chandan K. Saikia (URS Corporation), Mahendra Pal Singh (Virginia Tech) and Krishna
Vatsa (George Washington University).

The team not only surveyed the damaged caused to structures, and installations, but
also performed initial aerial and field reconnaissance of the Kutch region including the
epicentral area of the Bhuj earthquake. “The tectonic setting of the Kutch region is not well
understood. The region has characteristics of both intraplate and plate margin environments.
The presence of an active fold and thrust belt suggests that this region is part of the diffuse
Indian/Asian plate boundary, or at least a transition zone between the stable portion of
peninsular India and the plate boundary,” noted Lettis and Hengesh in a field report files
from Gujarat. “However, some properties of the region, such as crustal thickness, rigidity
and attenuation may be similar to more stable continental environments. Further research is
to document the style and rate of deformation in the Kutch region prior to using the Bhuj
earthquake as an example of a classic intraplate event.”
 In fact, EERI has been studying Indian quakes as part of its “Learning from
Earthquakes” program with the objective of learning lessons from quakes so as to reduce
quake risk in future. In the past, after the Uttarkashi (1991), Killari/Latur (1993), Jabalpur
(1997), and Chamoli (1999) quakes, EERI supported the IITK team for post-earthquake
reconnaissance. After the Jabalpur quake, the IITK team made important observations on
buildings with open first story or “soft story”. Open first story is a typical feature in modern
multistory constructions in urban India. Such features are highly undesirable in buildings
built in seismically active areas. This has been verified in numerous experiences of strong
shaking during past earthquakes.

Many earthquakes in the past, like San Fernando (1971) and Northridge (1994) have
demonstrated the potential hazard associated with such buildings. Major damage to critical
hospital facilities in the San Fernando earthquake was attributed to the soft first story.
Alarming amount of damage to the buildings with open basements for parking has been
reported during the Northridge earthquake. The Jabalpur earthquake also illustrated the
handicap of Indian buildings with soft first story,” the IITK team observed. The Jabalpur
earthquake, the first one in an urban neighborhood in India, provided an opportunity to
assess the performance of engineered buildings in the country. In the Bhuj quake also, a lot
of buildings with soft stories have collapsed.

The EERI-IITK collaboration has been further strengthened with the setting up of the
National Information Center for Earthquake Engineering (NICEE)–– the first of its kind in
India. “Objectives of NICEE are rather simple. Collect and disseminate earthquake
engineering information, literature, etc., to any interested person in the country. We felt that
it will go a long way in capacity building within the country to be able to reduce earthquake
disasters in the future,” Says Jain, who is NICEE coordinator. The United States too has
similar set-ups for earthquake engineering (at the University of California, Berkeley, the
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and the State University of New York, Buffalo)
since individual institutions cannot afford to purchase all the information. For NICEE, IITK
has adopted the SUNY Buffalo model in which the publications acquired by the center are
housed in the main library itself.

EERI has been providing its report and publications to NICEE free. Others who are
contributing include the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at
Buffalo (MCEER) and the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, California.
George Housner of Caltech – considered father of Earthquake Engineering by many- also has
been providing encouragement and contributing a lot of books.

The engineering of earthquake-resistant constructions is rather a new discipline, and

rapid developments are taking place in this area. But the gap between state-of-the-art and
that in India has been widening in time. One of the contributing factors to this widening gap
is the non-availability of latest books, journals, reports, and other materials emanating from
other countries to the Indian researchers and professionals. NICEE is trying to compensate.
"it appears to me that the most pressing need today is toward institution building and
manpower development. To implement any ideas or concepts you will first need people,"
says Jain.
 Indian scientists have been collaborating with American scientists in another vital
area- study of crustal deformations in India using satellite technology. They have been using
high precision Global Positioning System surveys to study the crustal deformations, using a
constellation of GPS satellites owned and operated by the U.S. government.

As the Indian plate moves in a northeastward direction with a certain velocity, it

collides with the Eurasian plate. For the past 25 million years, India has been colliding with
Asia. The collision has consumed an entire ocean, several island arcs and an unknown
fragment of the continent of India, resulting in the elevation of the Tibetan plateau to an
average height of five kilometers. The instantaneous rate of collision holds the clue both to
the stability of the Tibetan plateau and to the recurrence intervals of great earthquakes in the
Himalayas. Hitherto, the collision rate has been poorly known. Quantifying the resulting
strain is extremely useful for earthquake hazard studies.

In order to determine the collision rate, a group led by Roger Bilham at the University
of Colorado began GPS measurements in Nepal and Tibet in 1991. The group conducted
measurements in 1992 and 1994, and re-measured all points in November 1995 collaborating
with French scientists and the Nepalese Survey Department. It collected GPS data
throughout India, collaborating with scientists at the Centre for Mathematical Modelling and
Computer Simulation (C-MMACS), Bangalore, led by Vinod K. gaur. An eminent
geophysicist, Gaur has been selected for the 2001 Edward A. Flinn III award of the American
Geophysical Union, in recognition of his "unselfish cooperation in research through
facilitating, coordinating, and implementing activities that have greatly strengthened the
infrastructure for geophysical research."

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) also plans to strengthen its GIIS
network by setting up more stations across the country. The Department of Science and
Technology is funding a string of permanent, semi-permanent and field GPS stations at
various scientific institutions. One field station was moved to the Bhuj area soon after the
January 26 quake for local area studies. The instrumentation like (GPS receivers and
monitoring equipment for some of the stations is being supplied by a U.S.-based firm
Trimble. DST officials say GPS data collection in India has received a boost with the U.S.
Department of Defense lifting certain restrictions on collection of high resolution data in May
fast year.

The USGS and IMD have been in talks for sometime with regard to IMD joining
USGS’ Global Seismographic Network (GSN). But there has been no agreement on sharing
of data. GSN has replaced an earlier 40-year-old network called World Wide Standard
Seismographic Network (WWSSN). "We have closed virtually all stations of this network,
including those in India, and overlaid the world with the GSN. While some of these GSN
stations were sited in old WWSSN sites, the proposed GSN stations in India would have
been at old WWSSN sites. But there has been no agreement on exchange of data with IMD,"
says john S. Derr, GSN chief.

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About the Author: Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi based freelance journalist and columnist
on science & technology and information technology issues.
Article courtesy: SPAN Magazine